traced
beforehand. The shilling duty on a quarter of corn was abolished--"an
exceeding strong case," as Mr. Gladstone called it--taxes on conveyances
were adjusted, and the duty on fire insurance was removed. The only
notable contribution to the standing problem of widening the base of
taxation was the proposal to put a tax on matches.(244) This was a notion
borrowed from the United States, and much approved by Mr. Wells, the
eminent free-trade financier of that country. In England it was greeted
with violent disfavour. It was denounced as reactionary, as violating the
first principles of fiscal administration, and as the very worst tax that
had been proposed within recent memory, for is not a match a necessary of
life, and to tax a necessary of life is to go against Adam Smith and the
books. The money, it was said, ought to have been got either by raising
the taxes on tea and sugar, or else by putting the shilling duty back on
corn again, though for that matter, tea, sugar, and corn are quite as much
necessaries of life as, say, two-thirds of the matches used.(245) No care,
however, was given to serious argument; in fact, the tax was hardly argued
at all. Some hundreds of poor women employed at a large match factory in
the east end of London trooped to protest at Westminster, and the tax was
quickly dropped. It was perhaps unlucky that the proposal happened to be
associated with Mr. Lowe, for his uncomplimentary criticisms on the
working class four or five years before were neither forgotten nor
forgiven. A Latin pun that he meant to print on the proposed halfpenny
match stamp, _ex luce lucellum_, "a little gain out of a little light,"
was good enough to divert a college common room, but it seemed flippant to
people who expected to see the bread taken out of their mouths.

On the other side of the national account Mr. Gladstone was more
successful. He fought with all his strength for a reduction of the public
burdens, and in at least one of these persistent battles with colleagues
of a less economising mind than himself, he came near to a breach within
the walls of his cabinet. In this thankless region he was not always
zealously seconded. On Dec. 14, 1871, he enters in his diary: "Cabinet,
3-7. For two and a half hours we discussed army estimates, mainly on
reduction, and the chancellor of exchequer did not speak one word." The
result is worth recording. When Mr. Gladstone was at the exchequer the
charge on naval, mil